Assistant Principals' Report
Dear HPS Community,
Welcome to our newsletter item for this week.
Refugee Education Support Program (RESP)
Heidelberg PS has been selected to participate in the RESP Accelerate in 2025 with four local schools: Viewbank College, Preston North East PS, Northside Christian College and Coburg High School.
RESP works with participating primary, secondary and special development schools in the government and non-government sectors in five defined geographic clusters across Victoria. The program creates a learning community across school clusters to share their practices and ideas to support each other.
RESP uses a Whole School Approach to explore five areas of action: teaching and learning, families, partnerships with community agencies, transitions, and school climate (including empowering student voice).
RESP Accelerate focuses on three of these areas: partnerships with families, transitions, and school climate.
The Refugee Education Support Program has been designed to complement DET’s Framework for Improving Student Outcomes (FISO 2.0) and Catholic Education Commission Victoria’s School Improvement Framework and supports the Refugee Accountability Statement requirements.
Children and young people from refugee backgrounds are often highly motivated, bringing with them a range of skills and strengths to succeed in their education, but can often face significant challenges in accessing the support they need to remain engaged in and successfully navigate school.
These educational challenges are often compounded due to learning a new language, navigating a new culture and social system, building peer relationships, negotiating grief and loss associated with separation from significant others and an unfamiliar and different education environment.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many of these barriers became more pronounced, and more visible to schools, school staff, education stakeholders and the broader community. Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of targeted interventions and programs which promote equitable access to education and education outcomes.
In response, RESP provides schools with coordinated support to have a positive impact on the academic and wellbeing outcomes of children and young people from refugee backgrounds.
We are very excited to be a part of this project as we believe this project will not only help our refugee families but all our families. Our Action Team is a fantastic mix of teaching and Education Support staff (Helen, Katelyn, Candice, Libby, Nicola, Mel and Thuy) leading this work recently had an onboarding meeting to begin auditing our current practices here at HPS and learn more about the program. We will work with two not for profit organisations Foundation House and Centre for Multicultural Youth.
Books & Their People
Local artist – and Heidelberg Primary parent! - Brett Scapin will undertake a collaborative photo project that captures members of our community with their most cherished book.
Throughout November, visitors to Ivanhoe Library and Cultural Hub are invited to sit for a portrait with the book (or series of books) that has played an important part in their life.
The final day is this Saturday, 30th November from 10:00am – 5:00pm in the Mungga Artist Studio.
Link to Brett’s project https://www.banyule.vic.gov.au/Events-activities/Whats-on/Council-events/Artist-in-residence-Brett-Scapin
Student reports
Student reports provide meaningful information for teachers, students and their parents/carers on students' achievement and progress against clearly defined standards; this includes what has been learned and how well, where improvement is needed, and what should be done next.
- Student reporting refers to the school's processes and approaches to reporting student achievement and progress, this includes the 'when', 'who' and 'how' of reporting.
- Student reports refers to the formal document, it is the 'what' of student reporting. Student reports comprise high-level, point-in-time judgements of achievement and progress that are determined through analysis of a range of assessment evidence.
Student reports will be ready for parent, carer and student viewing in the last week of school. A newsfeed will be sent to families to alert parents and carers when they can be accessed on Compass.
We would also like to thank the teaching staff for the work and dedication required to provide informative and purposeful reports that the celebrate progress and achievement of students.
Have a wonderful weekend and week ahead!
Helen Thomas & Monique Rankin
Assistant Principals
Heidelberg Primary School